Southern California -- this just in

Setting L.A. Times stories to song: The week's Column One features

March 16, 2013 | 12:32
pm

Calling
all lovers of good storytelling and good music (and not necessarily in that
order).

So
you don’t have to do all the work, here’s a curated list of the week’s
offerings of the signature Times feature called the Column One, which I’m
pretty jazzed to be editing. And because I listen to music as I edit, you’ll
also get the songs that inspired me while I was editing the stories, or reading
them later. A curated story-song combo!

Column
One is a proud tradition at The Times. In fact, if you’re under 40, it’s older
than you are. But great writing is timeless.

Here’s
how I like to sum up Column One: There’s a scene in the movie “McCabe and Mrs.
Miller” where the Warren Beatty character is sitting on his bed, fretting over
the fact that the Julie Christie character doesn’t love him. It’s a lovely,
rambling, mumbled monologue, and the line I love is: “I’ve got poetry in me.”
Column One has poetry in it.

In
these roundups of the week gone by, I’d like to offer the first paragraphs of
the story -- maybe they’ll buy your eye. If so, there’s a helpful link to the
story, and the song that pairs with it.

Monday’s
Column One:

It's
a long way from Christy Walton's ocean-view manse near La Jolla to the arid
plains of 1940s New Mexico.

But
over the decades, the billionaire heiress to the Wal-Mart fortune has found
solace and inspiration in Rudolfo Anaya's coming-of-age novel, “Bless Me,
Ultima,” set in that unforgiving landscape, and in the mystical story of a
Mexican American boy named Tony who lives there.

Finally,
a realization hit her.

“One
of the things I wanted to do before I died was to see this book made into a
movie,” Walton said one recent morning, gazing from her cliffside home toward
the Pacific. “It's the only book I've ever felt that way about."

Announcements
of a well-funded research project at a major university often elicit, welcome
or not, professional and amateur advice. But those messages usually don't
recount a dead cat's spirit flitting into the afterlife.

UC
Riverside philosophy professor John Martin Fischer has been besieged with
hundreds of such unusual missives for the last few months as word spread that
he had won a $5-million grant to study something that, in the end, is probably
unknowable: immortality.

On
Thursday, we held the Column One to make room for the coverage of the new pope.
(We do that occasionally when big news breaks. But you can always go to
latimes.com/columnone to get your Column One fix.)

Roshawne
Mackey walked into the Jordan Downs community center clutching a pink pamphlet
from a funeral over the weekend, her face like stone.

Her
niece had been 11 — a diabetic who wasn't given her insulin shots. The dozen or
so women in the parenting class listened as Mackey described how the little girl
used to make backpacks out of cereal boxes, how she'd adored Hello Kitty.
Mackey's expression remained stoic, but tears slid from her eyes.